Finally I’ve taken together how much we spent during our four month trip through South-East Asia and China. As you can read about here on the blog we tried to keep our budget down with the occasional splurge when we felt like it. We most often stayed at budget hostels and guesthouse (see further here) and travelled with local transportation as much as possible but money was never an obstacle when it came to activities that we really wanted to do.

Before we flew out to Asia we basically bought three things. These three things are not calculated into the average spending per day below. These three things were (note – all numbers are in USD):

Flight tickets

$3,354

Vaccinations

$800

Chinese Visa

$200

Total

$4,354

The flights that we booked beforehand were Reykjavík-London-Bangkok-Hong Kong-Beijing-London-Reykjavík – in that order. We bought all our tickets through a company called airtreks and were very happy with their services.

I think that we had all possible vaccinations available – or at least those that were recommended by the tourist clinic in Zurich. The vaccination cost might be a bit higher, at least this is what we can remember for sure.

For the most of the trip we used debit cards to get money from ATMs so it was fairly easy to see what we spent in each country. I just had to look up the dates, when we crossed the borders and voila!

Country

Days stayed

Total spent in country

Spent per day

per person per day

Thailand

42

$2,449

$58

$29

Cambodia

10

$503

$50

$25

Vietnam

25

$2,212

$89

$44

Laos

7

$591

$84

$42

Hong Kong

4

$251

$63

$31

China

22

$1.548

$70

$35

Total

110

$7.554

$69

$34

As you can see we spent on average $69 per day including everything except the three things mentioned at the top. Cambodia seems to be the cheapest country according to our experience and Vietnam the most expensive one. To be fair to Vietnam we did spend over $400 on clothes in Hoi An and if I subtract those $400 the average spending goes down to about $72 a day. We also did a few expensive things in Laos like the elephant ride that pushes the spending in Laos up a bit.

In total we spent close to $12,000 on the trip or about $1,500 per person per month, which is definitely on the low side. At least what we got out of the trip is worth so much much more!

Of course we did everything as a couple and people travelling alone can expect to pay a bit more for accommodation and food but maybe not that much more.

In the end I would just like to encourage anyone thinking about taking such a trip to just to go for it – it’s easier and less expensive than people think!

If you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to post them below.

This is a question I have often pondered and no wonder if you think about the reputation tourists have: the French tourists are considered intolerably arrogant, the British are always wasted (as are the Icelandic), the Germans are so cheap that they fill their pockets with the bread from the buffet, the Japanese don’t care as long as the get the picture, the Swiss get agitated if the train comes one minute too late, the Russians don’t know the meaning of courtesy, the Americans are way too loud and the Chinese respect no rules and so on and so on.

As I’m writing this we are graduating from being tourist to just ordinary people in transit :) We’ve been tourists, surrounded by tourists for a few months now and we’ve thought about and talked about tourists a lot.

What we have noticed is that tourists are very special people in deed. For one, tourists dress in a way that is immediately noticeable. Somehow they are always a bit out of tune – too heavily dressed in trekking shoes and fleece sweaters, too lightly dressed in flip-flops and shorts, too much new gear, too much Columbia and North Face or too much local stuff that no local would ever wear – what ever that may be. Tourists definitely don’t dress in the same manner as they would at home that is for sure.

Tourists are not the best mannered people either. Often they are pressed with time or money or both and act accordingly. They want everything – right now – this minute – either free or for as little money as possible. They are on a tight schedule and want to get their money’s worth, including pictures and all and can get a bit agitated is things are not going their way.

According to our observations, the bigger the tourist group – the more exaggerated this (mis-)behavior becomes. I thought that when people come in groups they would be more concerned about their behavior so that the others in their group would not condemn them but it seems that in big groups one’s misbehavior is another one’s license to misbehave. Who hasn’t been in a group where you really want that perfect photo of that local person doing that local stuff but you feel it is inappropriate just to go for it. But when someone in the group takes the first picture everyone thinks that it is OK to fire away.

Throughout our trip I’ve thought a lot about the impact tourists make on the local communities and the environment and quite often the picture isn’t pretty. Communities and ecosystems have been spoiled and even ruined due to the arrival of too many tourists and same goes for invaluable cultural sites that have been tramped down by tourists hungry for that perfect photo.

So are tourists evil? Just so that I can live with my self for being a tourist for the past few months I’m forced to think of some good things about tourists and the tourist industry. So what is positive about tourists …humm ….?

I think there are two great things about tourists and tourism. First, it is the money tourists bring with them and spend along the way. Tourists spend huge amount of money and they are most willing to spend their money where prices are low and most often that is in low income areas so tourists often make the most impact where there is the most need. One can therefore argue that to some extent tourism is one sort of income or wealth distribution.

Secondly, I think that tourism or rather travel provides a great platform where different people can meet and get to know each other, share experiences and learn about each other. This should bring us all closer together and lower the walls between different cultures. It is just like the small town rivalry where I grew up, we hated (ok, more disliked) people from Akureyri and despised all that they stood for – there was simply no other option. But all (most) the people from Akureyri that I’ve gotten to know have been very nice people indeed – so getting to know them has eliminated my “hatred” :)

I’m sure there are more positive sides of tourism like spreading knowledge, stimulating the economy, extending the collective gene pool, decreasing racism, showing that all the animals in the forest need to be friends and so on but I’ll let do with those two above.

During our trip we (the tourists) tried as much as we could to stay away from other tourists during our travels. Maybe not because tourists are evil but because we weren’t travelling to see them with all their quirks – we were travelling to see the natives and local people and their quirks.

What do you think? Are tourists evil? Have they changed your community? Do you have a compelling story about tourists? …or better yet, a funny story of tourists? Bring it on!

There are now two weeks since we were in South East Asia and we have had a little time to digest all the things we did and all the memories that we created. Therefore I decided to create a few “top five” lists.

Below is an article that I wrote for a friend’s blog. You can check out Natasha’s blog here and a permanent link to my article here. I was very amused reading Natasha’s introduction that I included at the end of the article.

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The first thing that I noticed upon arriving in South-East Asia was the entrepreneurial spirit of the people—a spirit that was noticeable everywhere we went. It might be the case that a lot of the people have been forced to start their own business out of lack of options, but that certainly does not apply to all of them. I started thinking about all the people I know who dream of starting their own business. Do we need to be forced to live the lives we dream of? Being your own boss, though, is not just fun and play, since there is often no one to take care of business for you—and this leads to the next topic: work-life balance.

People in South-East Asia seem to work from very early in the morning to very late in the evening, often over sixteen hours a day, and work seems to be their life. If you work sixteen hours and have kids, you have a problem. That problem seems to be fixed in two ways: either people take their kids to work or they depend on their extended family. As you know, the elders in Asia are not put in old people’s homes, but live with their families and have their role there. I’m not saying it should be like this in the West—it’s just nice to see how that works well in Asia.

There is one thing that has bothered me for a long time and that is the feature creep. All too often in the past I wanted to buy something that I had previously been very satisfied with, like the computer that I bought two years ago or the Nokia 5110 phone or a bike with just five gears. Those things should be available at a fairly low price but no, you can only buy the latest model with all the new features that have been invented since. In Asia this is actually possible! It is possible to buy a phone that only does SMS and phone calls, or a bike with no gears, or a low-cost computer that does what you want it to and nothing more.

You can’t miss the great importance of spirituality in Asia. In three of the four countries I visited, Theravada Buddhism is the main religion and participation is very high. Buddhism is quite different from the Abrahamic religions and it seems like spirituality is intertwined with every aspect of people’s lives. In the West there has been more focus on organized religions than on individual and private involvement.

During my travels I also noted at least three issues that are connected with the development of the countries of South-East Asia and their quest to be among the developed nations of this world. I have a lot of questions around those topics but haven’t had the time to find the answers. Maybe you have some insights?

First, how will Asia deal with all the pollution and garbage in the coming years, as they develop? As we consume more resources we create more waste—unless something changes in the way we act. Both garbage and pollution are already a problem in the region, so it is imperative that these countries find new solutions to deal with the waste they create.

Second, how can Asia sustain its agriculture, as the food consumption moves away from rice production towards greater use of meat and grains? When nations become richer they consume more meat and grains than before, which puts more pressure on local resources and on the environment. This will become a big problem in regions that are already under much pressure.

And third, how will Asia deal with even more traffic, with the increase of cars on the roads? When people have more money to spend, more and more of them choose to opt for a car instead of the more traditional scooter. This will put pressure on the already congested traffic system. As I said, I don’t have the answers to these questions, but they kept popping up as we traveled though the region.

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Örn Thordarson was born in Húsavík, on the northern tip of Iceland—the most beautiful place on Earth and home of the Icelandic Phallological Museum. He has a background in computer science and worked in the financial sector for about ten years before getting his MBA from the University of St. Gallen, where he is known for introducing fellow students to fermented shark and sheep’s balls (in addition to numerous other qualities). He is currently travelling in China and plans on returning to Iceland in May 2010.

Now that we are about to leave South East Asia for China I started thinking about what we have gained – and lost – during the trip. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly since most of the gains are memories and experience and other internal stuff but I gave it my best shot.

Gained:

Like any tourist we have bought a few souvenirs, not too many since we have had to carry them, but a few – and a few presents as well.

So far we have gained over 1,300 photos and videos that we didn’t have before. I’m especially excited about the videos that I plan to edit and post here when back home.

Surely the biggest item that we have gained is experience and the peta bites of memories that we are storing from the trip. Traveling on our own for three months has been a great experience and hopefully we have matured a bit – wishful thinking but one can always hope :)

It is invaluable that we now have more appreciation for the things that we have back home. Both seeing so many that are not as privileged as us and also just being away from everything that we have have taken for granted has definitely given more appreciation of everything we have back home in Iceland.

Lost

We have lost combine 11 kg of body weight. Without really trying the weight seems to fall off. I credit this mostly to proper portion sizes since we are eating all food – fried, baked, roasted, candy, ice-cream and everything else.

Surely we have lost (or rather invested) a few thousand dollars. I would say though that the trip hasn’t really been expensive and definitely well worth it. Maybe we’ll calculate the real cost when we get back home and post it here on the blog.

In the annoying bus incident I lost a wallet, gaffer tape, a flash light and one thousand krónur so that must be accounted for.

After the bed bugs attack Elínborg threw away her sleeping bag so that one is definitely lost. She also washed her purse and then left it outside in the sun to dry and someone took it by mistake so the purse can be written on the bed bugs as well.

We were quite happy to loose the white/gray skin color that we brought with us. It has, at least momentarily, been replaced by darker/browner color. I hope that we can bring some of that color back home but we’ll have to see what China has to say about that.

So if we balance the books I think that we have gained a lot more than the few items that were lost and most of them we were quite happy to get rid of (grayish skin and fat).

Tomorrow we’ll be flying to Hong Kong for a couple of days and then it’s China baby!

It is only natural that before going on an almost four month journey with just a single back pack, something that we hadn’t done before, we had some concerns and worries regarding how things will turn out. In this post I will list the main concerns we had before leaving home and address them now that we have visited all the four countries, here in South East Asia, that we will be visiting on this trip. So below are our concerns.

Is backpacking something for us?

We have seen people from the age of seventeen up to almost seventy backpacking so it is fair to say that backpacking can be for anyone – at least age doesn’t seem to be a deciding factor.

Being on our own with nothing other than our backpack has given us great freedom to go wherever we have wanted to go, whenever we have wanted to go. We have had absolute freedom regarding how we spend our money and when. All that freedom has been just fantastic.

We have been on an organized trip before and I have to say that backpacking suites us much better than a package trip, especially here in South East Asia where there are so many people backpacking and the infrastructure for it is great. It is less of a hassle than one would think and it quickly becomes a routine to find a new hostel or organize activities or decide where to go next.

Will it be fun to travel for four months?

Before heading off this was a big question mark. Before this trip our longest trip had been three weeks or so and we have always been quite happy to return home.

Travelling for such a long time has definitely been different in many ways. We have not been in such a rush to see as much as we can before returning home and that has given the whole trip a different rhythm. It has also affected our buying habits in a nice way – often when abroad we’ve been thinking about what to buy and maybe focusing too much on that aspect but now we have just postponed all buying decisions and just been enjoying the places we have been visiting.

Of course there have been ups and downs in the almost three months that have already passed but for the most part the trip has been a fantastic adventure. I think that the downs are mostly connected with staying too long in a particular place and we have become bored of the place or maybe more the atmosphere at that place. A couple of times we have also experienced a kind of travel boredom where for instance we can go and see a world famous temple or something like that but because we have seen so many fantastic temples we aren’t really interested, which is kind of sad.

I’m not sure we’ll ever go on such a long trip again and this has surely been a once in a lifetime experience. I think that the optimal trip length for us might be somewhere around six to eight weeks and we would surely rather go twice for eight weeks than once for the four months :)

There are numerous stories of people that start backpacking and when the get back home the can’t wait to go on the road again …and again so only time can tell how thing will go in our case :)

How will the accommodation be at our price point?

We have been staying at budget hostels and guesthouses, typically priced between 8-20 dollars for two depending on the price level in that particular town. I would say that the accommodation in general has been better than we expected. Of course there have been a few instances where we should have looked further but decided to stay but for the most part we have been fairly lucky. The worst experiences have been when we have arrived after dark to a new place tired and annoyed and not bothered to look hard enough and settled for something less than satisfying – we’ve kind of always known but still didn’t look further.

Will we like the food?

The food around here has ranged from being absolutely fantastic to being nothing special. It has never been bad and that says something. We only had problems finding something we liked on two occasions, first in Bangkok after we arrived and that was just that we were afraid to try and too conscious about sanitation and cleanliness, which has never been an actual problem here. The other time was in Phenom Penh where it wasn’t easy to find nice places to eat at.

In general the Western food hasn’t been too good except that we’ve had a few good pizzas. The Western food is also a lot more expensive than the local food and definitely not worth the extra money. In quite many places we could find Indian food and that was always very good. A bit more pricy than the local food but great to mix things up.

The Thai food has been fantastic wherever we have been – at the guesthouses, with street vendors or at restaurants. The curries and the fried rice, soups and nonames, noodles and pancakes and the variety of fresh seafood is astonishing.

The food in Cambodia was a bit of a disappointment after the Thai food. It always felt like they put too little chilly in everything so it tasted a little bland. The exception was the Amok, which is a special kind of Cambodian curry. The food wasn’t bad but just needed more seasoning for our taste.

Vietnamese food received mixed reviews in the group. I loved the food but Elínborg was less impressed. They have a great variety so there is plenty to choose from and everyone should be able of find something they like. The street vendors offer really fresh and good baguettes that we ate a lot for breakfast and most places have wonderful Vietnamese coffee.

The food in Laos was always good – even the Western food. It had some French influence with great baguettes and fantastic Lao coffee and I only remember everything tasting good in Laos.

What about sanitation and what diseases could we catch?

In terms of diseases we took some precautions before heading off. We went to a vaccination clinic in Switzerland and got all the vaccinations they recommended. Of course one can not be vaccinated against all diseases so we took some medicine with us. What we took is listed here.

We have actually been surprised about the sanitation level of food and food products. We just expected that we would have a mild food poisoning once in a while or stomach aches after eating something bad but that hasn’t occurred at all. We have had some aches after eating something too spicy for our stomachs but that is easy to avoid. We have eaten at Western restaurants, local restaurants, local homes, street vendors and food markets and at no point have we eaten anything that has given us problems.

What about visas?

When you fly into Thailand you get a 30 day visa exemption for free (at least most European citizens) and if you enter on land borders you get a 15 day exemption so there is no hassle to enter Thailand, just make sure that you don’t overstay the exemption or you’ll get a 500 baht per day fine.

Visa into Cambodia is available at most borders for $20. We had heard of Cambodian border controllers asking for more money and to avoid all hassle we bought an e-Visa off the internet for $25, a very easy two day process and in the end you have a print-out that you show at the border.

We got the Vietnamese visa in the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok. I think that it cost 1,900 baht if you wait for two days but 2,200 baht, just over $60, if you want to pick it up the next day. However it was much cheaper to get the visa at the Vietnamese embassy in Phenom Penh, Cambodia. I think that it costs 30-35 dollars over there.

The Visa into Laos was available at the airport in Luang Prabang and cost about $30. We were out of dollars but they were happy to take baht instead – at a reasonable exchange rate.

When we entered Burma we got a day permit (apparently good for two nights) at the border for $10 or 500 baht so bring dollars if you have them.

The visa for China we got at the Chinese embassy in Reykjavík. We got a six month visa with two entries just to make sure and that was around $100 if I .remember correctly. Maybe a three month, one entry visa would have been sufficient but we didn’t really know at the time.

So if you stay slightly informed the visas shouldn’t pose any problems. Just check before the trip if all the countries that you want to go to offer visas to citizens of your country.

What about bugs and other unknown creatures?

The only creature that has really been bothering us are the mosquitoes. They seem to love fresh Nordic blood. There are over 3,000 different types of mosquitoes, each slightly different from the others. We have usually been most bitten when we are at a new place. Then we learn how, where and when the mosquitoes bite and can better avoid them. Some bite in the morning, others at dusk and yet others during the night. Some bite mostly by the joints, others on the feet and some in the limbs so the are a bit difficult to figure out. The best way to avoid them is to be properly clothed in the early morning and at dusk and apply some mosquitoes repellant – we have used 50% deet.

We have once meet bed bugs. We didn’t see them at first, actually we weren’t really looking but as soon as we laid on the bed the came forwards. Bed bugs are nasty looking creatures looking a bit like lice and they bite you if they can. The bite is not dangerous but itches a lot. We had been warned that we could encounter them and that we should always check the beds before deciding on a room but we hadn’t seen any after ten weeks so we weren’t really checking any more.

We have seen some rats but only in the street so they have not been bothering us at all. We have seen some cockroaches as well and had a few of them visiting our rooms but I wouldn’t say that has been common – maybe in every tenth guesthouse or even more seldom. There are ants everywhere here so if you leave something they like they are pretty quick to find it and carry it away so don’t forget those chips on the table :)

Will there be people everywhere trying to scam us?

We have encountered a few scams along the way as can be seen here. I think that all of them can be easily avoided by using common sense and be a little prepared. The Lonely planet books list a few of the scams so that is a good start. Just remember that there is no free lunch and always double check all prices and you’ll be good

It is understandable that people with little money try get as much for products and services as they possibly can – it’s the same as we do in the West – so that can’t really be categorized as a scam. We have however seen that it pays to shop around and check for the prices at other vendors. Often people add a tourist premium or just think that you have just arrived and try to charge too much.

Will we be in danger?

I don’t think that we have been in any danger at any point in our trip, at least not more danger than if we would have stayed at home ;) Everyone connected with tourism has seemed to us as very responsible and safety minded. Even the bus drivers, that seem to have a bad reputation on the internet, were quite good and drove responsibly.

Just one warning, always keep all valuables with you and not in your big back pack, especially while on the busses. At one point someone went through our bags during a bus ride and we have heard of other instances on boats and in storage rooms at guesthouses so it is better to be safe than sorry and keep everything valuable with you!